The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview

One of the Genoveses’ most prominent subjects, the politician James
Henry Hammond, provides telling testimony against their thesis. If
Hammond was a God-fearing Christian who read his Bible faithfully, he
had a strange way of showing it. In the mid-1840s, he was driven from
the governor’s mansion in Charleston when word leaked out that he was
having sexual relations with all four of his nieces. A decade later,
his career miraculously revived, he became the most prominent
spokesperson for what was later termed herrenvolk republicanism: the
idea that one race could live happily and prosperously by subjugating
another. There’s nothing about Hammond’s personal life in The Mind of
the Master Class – even his wife refused to live with him when he
insisted on keeping his slave mistress in their home – but the
omission of his views on race is especially startling. In 1858 he told
the US Senate that all successful societies depended on ‘a class to do
the menial duties’, and that this ‘mudsill’ had been provided in the
South by slavery. ‘We do not think that whites should be slaves either
by law or necessity,’ Hammond said. ‘Our slaves are black, of another
and inferior race.’